{"id":2487,"date":"2015-09-21T21:09:37","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T01:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2487"},"modified":"2017-01-12T16:23:49","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T21:23:49","slug":"five-announcements-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2487","title":{"rendered":"Six announcements"},"content":{"rendered":"
    \n
  1. I did a podcast interview<\/a> with Julia Galef\u00a0for her series\u00a0“Rationally Speaking.”<\/a>\u00a0 See also here<\/a> for the transcript (which I read rather than having to listen to myself stutter). \u00a0The\u00a0interview is all about Aumann’s Theorem, and whether rational people can agree to disagree. \u00a0It covers a lot\u00a0of the same ground as my recent post<\/a>\u00a0on the same topic, except\u00a0with less technical detail about agreement theory and more … well, agreement<\/em>. \u00a0At Julia’s suggestion, we’re planning to do a follow-up podcast about the particular intractability of online<\/em> disagreements. \u00a0I feel confident that we’ll solve\u00a0that problem once and for all. \u00a0(Update:<\/strong><\/span> Also check out\u00a0this YouTube video<\/a>, where Julia offers additional thoughts about what we discussed.)<\/li>\n
  2. When Julia asked me to recommend a book at the end of the interview, I picked probably my favorite contemporary novel:\u00a0The Mind-Body Problem<\/a> by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein<\/a>. \u00a0Embarrassingly, I hadn’t realized that Rebecca had already\u00a0been on<\/a> Julia’s show<\/a> twice as a guest! \u00a0Anyway, one of the thrills of my life over the last year has been to get to know Rebecca a little, as well as her husband, who’s some guy named Steve Pinker. \u00a0Like, they both live right here in Boston! \u00a0You can talk to them! \u00a0I was especially pleased two weeks ago to learn that Rebecca won the National Humanities Medal<\/a>—as I told Julia, Rebecca Goldstein getting a medal at the White House is the sort of thing I imagine happening in my ideal fantasy world, making it a pleasant surprise that it happened in this one. \u00a0Huge congratulations to Rebecca!<\/li>\n
  3. The NSA has released probably its most explicit public statement so far<\/a> about its plans to move to quantum-resistant\u00a0cryptography. \u00a0For more see\u00a0Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram<\/a>. \u00a0Hat tip for this item goes to reader Ole Aamot, one of the only people I’ve ever encountered whose name alphabetically precedes\u00a0mine.<\/li>\n
  4. Last Tuesday, I got to\u00a0hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali speak at MIT about her new book, Heretic<\/a><\/em>, and then\u00a0spend\u00a0almost an hour talking to students who had come to argue with her. \u00a0I found her clear, articulate, and courageous (as I guess one has\u00a0to be in her line of work, even with armed cops on either side of the lecture hall). \u00a0After the shameful decision of Brandeis in caving in to pressure<\/a> and cancelling Hirsi Ali’s commencement speech, I thought it spoke well\u00a0of MIT that they let\u00a0her\u00a0speak at all. \u00a0The bar shouldn’t be that low, but it is.<\/li>\n
  5. From far away on the political spectrum, I also heard Noam Chomsky talk last week (my first time hearing him live), about the current state of linguistics. \u00a0Much of the talk, it struck me, could have been given in the 1950s with essentially\u00a0zero change (and I suspect Chomsky would agree), though a few parts of it were newer, such as the speculation that human languages have many of the features they do in order to minimize the amount of computation that the speaker needs\u00a0to perform. \u00a0The talk was full of declarations that there had been no useful work whatsoever<\/em> on various questions (e.g., about the evolutionary function of language), that they were total\u00a0mysteries and would perhaps\u00a0remain total\u00a0mysteries forever.<\/li>\n
  6. Many of you have surely heard by now that Terry Tao solved\u00a0the Erd\u00f6s Discrepancy Problem<\/a>, by showing that for every\u00a0infinite sequence of heads and tails and every positive integer C, there’s a positive integer k such that, if you look at the subsequence formed by every kth<\/sup> flip, there comes a point where the heads outnumber tails or vice versa by at least C. \u00a0This resolves a problem<\/a> that’s been open for more than 80 years. \u00a0For more details, see this post by Timothy Gowers<\/a>. \u00a0Notably, Tao’s proof builds, in part, on a recent Polymath collaborative online effort. \u00a0It was a big deal last year when Konev and Lisitsa used a SAT-solver<\/a> to prove that there’s always a subsequence with discrepancy at least 3; Tao’s result now improves on that bound by \u221e.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I did a podcast interview with Julia Galef\u00a0for her series\u00a0“Rationally Speaking.”\u00a0 See also here for the transcript (which I read rather than having to listen to myself stutter). \u00a0The\u00a0interview is all about Aumann’s Theorem, and whether rational people can agree to disagree. \u00a0It covers a lot\u00a0of the same ground as my recent post\u00a0on the same […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[31,11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-nerd-interest","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2487"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2493,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions\/2493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}